They don’t pull users away from the competition, they grow their own user base much faster than the competition, the result being that most of the popular content is on their platform. If you want to follow that celebrity/ influencer / news organization/ sports reporter/ politician, you need to join threads.
And if people weren’t looking for a reason to leave Twitter, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The point is that this is how decentralized / open standards have been broken and made proprietary in the past.
If you think the aforementioned celebrities/influencers/news orgs/etc. are going to choose the fediverse instead of Threads or (I think more likely) BlueSky, that might make sense. I don’t see that happening though. What might instead happen is something like this:
Potential fediverse user: “I heard that Facebook’s new twitter competitor can work with these existing sites. So I can make an account on one of those and follow Celebrity X and Politician Y without making a Meta account.”
Potential fediverse admin: “Well yeah, but you can’t follow them from my instance. Or any of these other instances. You see, back in the 90s there was this concept called embrace, extend extinguish…”
No longer a potential fediverse user: “Oh, I guess I’ll just make a Meta/Bluesky account instead then.”
They don’t pull users away from the competition, they grow their own user base much faster than the competition, the result being that most of the popular content is on their platform. If you want to follow that celebrity/ influencer / news organization/ sports reporter/ politician, you need to join threads.
But that’s already true for Twitter.
And if people weren’t looking for a reason to leave Twitter, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The point is that this is how decentralized / open standards have been broken and made proprietary in the past.
If you think the aforementioned celebrities/influencers/news orgs/etc. are going to choose the fediverse instead of Threads or (I think more likely) BlueSky, that might make sense. I don’t see that happening though. What might instead happen is something like this:
Potential fediverse user: “I heard that Facebook’s new twitter competitor can work with these existing sites. So I can make an account on one of those and follow Celebrity X and Politician Y without making a Meta account.”
Potential fediverse admin: “Well yeah, but you can’t follow them from my instance. Or any of these other instances. You see, back in the 90s there was this concept called embrace, extend extinguish…”
No longer a potential fediverse user: “Oh, I guess I’ll just make a Meta/Bluesky account instead then.”